Donald Sadoway: The missing link to renewable energy

I am working on the energy sector, sort of. 

Renewable energy is always interesting topic for me, I have taken some courses related in the renewable energy. 

This talk was talking about actually the battery, which was a device which can store the electricity from the renewable energy, such as sun and wind. Especially, when there was no sun and wind at some moment. The device was a new form of energy storage that was called the liquid metal battery. 

The MIT professor started the project in 2006, and hired the undergraduate students, PhD and post-docs to work on such project. Currently, there is no battery technology capable of meeting the demanding performance requirements of the grid. We need the grid technology uncommonly high power, long service lifetime and super-low cost. 

The very first battery was invented by professor Alessandro Volta. It included a tack of coins, zinc and silver, separated by cardboard soaked in brine. (two electrodes) It works at room temperature, which is not enough. The Hall-Heroult cell operates at high temperature, a temperature high enough that the aluminun metal product is liquid. He found that the liquid metal, molten salt and high temperature could send high current through this thing. Thus, the liquid battery was invented, which was made of earth-abundant elements, of course (for cheap). 

Such a technology was neither stores nor generates electricity, but instead consumes electricity. The detailed technology was illustrated by professor in the ted tallks. The invented battery was pretty cool, it could store quite high capacity electricity. That is amazing. 

Full Spectrum: the OED defines spectrum as "The entire range of wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, from the longest radio waves to the shortest gamma rays of which the range of visible light is only a small part."